g thus been always accustomed to a patriarchal life, or to a war of
mountaineers, which he had only quitted to pass a few months in prison,
Djalma knew nothing, so to speak, of civilized society. Without its
exactly amounting to a defect, he certainly carried his good qualities
to their extreme limits. Obstinately faithful to his pledged word,
devoted to the death, confiding to blindness, good almost to a complete
forgetfulness of himself, he was inflexible towards ingratitude,
falsehood, or perfidy. He would have felt no compunction to sacrifice
a traitor, because, could he himself have committed a treason, he would
have thought it only just to expiate it with his life.

He was, in a word, the man of natural feelings, absolute and entire.
Such a man, brought into contact with the temperaments, calculations,
falsehoods, deceptions, tricks, restrictions, and hollowness of a
refined society, such as Paris, for example, would, without doubt,
form a very curious subject for speculation. We raise this hypothesis,
because, since his journey to France had been determined on, Djalma had
one fixed, ardent desire--to be in Paris.

In Paris--that enchanted city--of which, even in Asia, the land of
enchantment, so many marvelous tales were told.

What chiefly inflamed the fresh, vivid imagination of the young Indian,
was the thought of French women--those attractive Parisian beauties,
miracles of elegance and grace, who eclipsed, he was informed, even the
magnificence of the capitals of the civilized world. And at this very
moment, in the brightness of that warm and splendid evening, surrounded
by the intoxication of flowers and perfumes, which accelerated the
pulses of his young fiery heart, Djalma was dreaming of those exquisite
creatures, whom his fancy loved to clothe in the most ideal garbs.

It seemed to him as if, at the end of the avenue, in the midst of that
sheet of golden light, which the trees encompassed with their full,
green arch, he could see pass and repass, white and sylph-like, a host
of adorable and voluptuous phantoms, that threw him kisses from the tips
of their rosy fingers. Unable to restrain his burning emotions, carried
away by a strange enthusiasm, Djalma uttered exclamations of joy, deep,
manly, and sonorous, and made his vigorous courser bound under him in
the excitement of a mad delight. Just then a sunbeam, piercing the dark
vault of the avenue, shone full upon him.

For several minutes, a man had